


The Loudest Sound

by jazzsquared



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Lydia Martin & Meredith Walker Friendship, Mentioned Stiles Stilinski/Malia Tate, One Shot, Requited Unrequited Love, banshee bonding, implied Lydia Martin/Malia Tate friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:10:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzsquared/pseuds/jazzsquared
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Meredith doesn’t reply right away. In fact, her silence goes on so long that Lydia looks at her to make sure she’s not actually hearing a cosmic apocalyptic message. It’s Friday, so that kind of thing would be possible."</p>
<p>It's Friday night. Stiles has a date, Lydia is banshee-sitting, and Meredith hears something Lydia can't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Loudest Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Written for StydiaMonth! Set post-season 4/pre-season 5. I always loved Meredith and thought she deserved a way better ending. Such wasted potential! Give us banshee bonding! Give us portrayals of mental health issues that don't end in murder! 
> 
> I tried to keep this canon-compliant, but you have to suspend a little disbelief in accepting how they take a cavalier attitude to Meredith now.

“You sure you’re okay with her? Alone?”

Lydia draws her lips in a straight line and tilts her head at him.

“Yes.”

She’s firm, no room for argument, and manages to steer Stiles through the open front door. He spins on the mat, turning back around to look at her as he braces his arm on the doorframe.

“Are you sure you’re sure? She’s kinda…” he trails off, narrowing his eyes and twirling his fingers near his face, “… kinda got crazy eyes. And she tried to kill, like, everyone.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and meets his concerned expression without blinking.

“I’m pretty good at knowing when someone wants to kill me.”

He nods at this, looking down at his shoes and tapping out a concerto on the side of her door with his restless hand.

“Yeah, yeah. Okay, good point. But I can stay. We can totally stay. I mean, just in case.”

Lydia looks over his shoulder to his jeep, where Malia is leaning against the hood with her head bent over her new smartphone. She’s wearing second skin jeans and a slinky black top that Lydia herself helped pick out. This is not a girl dressed to sit around and watch Netflix.

“Stiles,” she unfolds her arms and uses her free hands to lightly push him away from the door and down the first step, “We’ll be fine here. Go take your girlfriend out to dinner.”

He turns for a moment, finds Malia waiting for him, and looks back to her.

“It’s date night," he stutters. "It’s a thing we do now. We go out. On dates. She read a magazine you gave her… and now we do this. Normal teen dating behavior. Date night.”

His hands gesture widely as he talks, and he ends his babbling with a wild sweep of his hand through his hair. He looks like he can’t quite believe any of it.

He sounds apologetic, too. About what exactly, Lydia isn't sure. 

By way of response, she nods once and then crosses her arms again, resting all her weight on one foot and cocking a hip as she does so.

He licks his lips, “It’s progress.”

She acknowledges that with another bob of her head and says, “Go. I’m fine.”

He backs away from the steps, fingers tucked in to the front pockets of his jeans as he walks backward. “You’ll text me if something comes up?”

“Yes, Stiles,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “If she tunes into a banshee frequency predicting the apocalypse, I’ll send you a Snapchat.”

Nearly to his jeep, Stiles spreads his arms wide and grins at her, “That’s all I’m asking.”

In spite of herself, she smiles back and twirls her fingers once at the happy couple before she closes the door on them.

Meredith sits exactly where Lydia left her: perched on a chair at the kitchen table, cupping an ancient flip phone to her ear like a shell. Her skinny eyebrows draw together as she listens. She’s always listening. She’s looks less like a mental patient since Lydia took away her grayed sweats and prodded her into some loose yoga clothes, but her eyes are still nearly black with enlarged pupils. It doesn’t make her look like she’s hanging out for a slumber party, but at least she doesn’t look like she just got out of five point restraints. Which she was just in, less than 24 hours ago. Before the Sheriff reluctantly stormed into Eichen House to demand her release. Because Scott McCall has a puppy dog heart and Deaton found a safe, secure place for her in Ireland.

They just had to keep her calm for one more day, until Deaton and a Druid friend could get her on a plane. She didn’t even need the double-wolf guard they anticipated; Kira gave her an old cell phone, and she went docile as a lamb.

“You hungry?” Lydia asks, standing in front of the open refrigerator. “You like eggs? Yogurt? I think we have some leftover lasagna? Olives?”

She says the last one as a joke, but Meredith has almost no sense of humor, and she sits up straight and chirps back, “Olives!” like Lydia has offered her chocolate lava cake.

Sighing into the arctic air coming in waves from the fridge, Lydia pulls out a jar of olives and a fat-free Greek yogurt. Coming to rest at her own seat at the kitchen table, she twists off the jar’s lid and slides it over to Meredith. Meredith digs in happily, stabbing a plump olive on her finger and popping it into her mouth with obvious relish.

“The Human left?” she says around a mouth full of salt.

“His name is Stiles, Meredith. You can call him by his name. It’s fine,” Lydia says, peeling off the lid on her cup of yogurt.

Meredith nods vigorously at this, squinting and pulling in her lower lip like she’s trying hard to commit this piece of social etiquette to memory. Even though she’s met everyone in the pack and knows all their names, she picked up the habit of calling people by their roles following her re-admission to Eichen House. The Doctor. The Nurse. The Alpha.

But she calls Lydia, “The Red Headed Girl,” like she’s in a twisted Charlie Brown comic.

“Stiles left?” Meredith tries again.

“Mmm hmm,” Lydia swirls her spoon and stares at the dead cell phone that Meredith dropped on the table when she seized her olives. _What would it tell her? Would she hear anything at all?_ “He has a date tonight.”

Meredith doesn’t reply right away. In fact, her silence goes on so long that Lydia looks at her to make sure she’s not actually hearing a cosmic apocalyptic message. It’s Friday, so that kind of thing would be possible.

Meredith sits with her head at a 45 degree angle and her eyes slanted in deep thought, like a confused cocker spaniel.

“What?” Lydia asks, setting her spoon on the table and expecting the worst. “Are you hearing… something?”

_Why don’t I hear it?_

Meredith blinks a few times but doesn’t answer, and Lydia’s hand is halfway to her fully charged, fully functional iPhone. 

“I don’t understand,” Meredith says, setting down the jar of olives and picking up the gray Nokia again. She traces the buttons with one of her bitten down fingernails.

It’s such a strange thing to say that Lydia looks around the kitchen, trying to identify the source of the voices Meredith must be hearing and answering. If not the cell phone, maybe the sleek Bose sound system on the sideboard? But then she realizes Meredith is looking at her, and she’s waiting for an answer.

“What? What don’t you understand?”

“Why is he on a date?”

Lydia resists the urge to say something snarky. After all, while Meredith had the benefit of growing up as an actual human, unlike _some_ people Lydia could name, she did spend most of her life shuttling amongst institutions while her conservative, religious parents denied that their daughter might have a gift rather than a curse. Deaton said all those psychotropic medications probably did her more harm than good since she wasn’t actually psychotic. And then there was the whole matter of Lydia’s own grandmother driving her over the edge. Meredith wasn’t exactly firing on normal developmental cylinders.

But come on. She didn’t get the concept of a date?

“Because that’s what you do when you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” Lydia tells her, trying to keep her tone kind. “You go on dates.”

Meredith’s face scrunches up like she’s offended, and she shakes her head. The look is so universal across all women expressing “wtf”, that for a moment, Lydia can imagine Meredith as a normal girl.

“The Coyote is his girlfriend?”

She says the word “coyote” like she doesn’t know what it means.

“Malia. Malia is his girlfriend. Yes,” Lydia scrapes the side of her yogurt cup, but can’t quite bring herself to bring the spoon to her mouth.

“But why?” Meredith pushes, her large dark eyes like little black holes in her face. She doesn’t ask in a mean way, in a derisive way. She asks in a mystified way.

Lydia shrugs, twisting her mouth to the side. “She just is. They like each other.”

For some reason, she wants to say as little as possible on the subject.

Meredith inhales deeply, pushing back in her chair so that she is ramrod straight. Her gaze darts all over the table top like she is chasing a stray thought with her eyes. Lydia tries to see what Meredith sees, even though she’s only ever heard of banshees hearing what other people can’t hear.

“But he loves you. And you love him. Why would he date The Coyote?”

Meredith says it so simply. Not like she’s dropping a shit sandwich in the middle of the table and fanning the fumes. She says it like she’s just trying to puzzle out something slightly difficult. Like mitosis.

Meanwhile, Lydia chokes on the yogurt she hasn’t actually put in her mouth.

“Wh—wait, wha—that’s…no. I mean, where did you even get that idea? I don’t--”

But she can’t complete the thought. She’s running up against some kind of barrier.

Meredith looks at Lydia owlishly.

“You’re both so loud,” she says, by way of explanation, lifting the flip phone back to her ear.

Lydia waits a beat or two, sure Meredith will elaborate further. She doesn’t.

“What do you mean?” Lydia says, setting her yogurt cup down on the table with prim precision.

But Meredith is lost again, to voices Lydia can’t hear. To voices Lydia isn’t sure she wants to hear if it means vacant eyes and careless hair and always living her life beyond the veil. To voices Lydia is desperate to hear if it means it might help. If it means she might _know_.

“Meredith,” she reaches across the table and curls her fingers around Meredith’s twiggy wrist, “What are you talking about? What do you mean that we’re ‘so loud’? Do you… are you hearing us? Some how?”

Her heart races and it runs up her throat and it’s all she can hear. Her heart pounding a bass beat and Meredith’s silence and nothing else.

Meredith sighs and leans her cheek into the phone, like she’s leaning into a lover’s caress. Her eyes drift close.

Lydia wants to scream.

Not like that.

But it’s no use. Meredith is wrapped in whispers and sighs that tell her things Lydia will never know or understand.

She stands, swiping the olives and the yogurt off the table. She clacks to the garbage, dropping both inside without a second thought. She can watch Meredith from the living room. She has AP Bio homework, and she’s working on a genetic mutation theory as applicable to the werewolf gene for her own personal extra credit, and she doesn’t have time for this psuedo-science banshee bullshit.

When she reaches the arched molding separating the kitchen from the living room, Meredith’s sleepy voice stops her in her tracks.

“You’re both screaming it so loud. Even now. How do you not hear it?”

She holds still. Holds her breath. There’s just quiet and her heart banging again in her throat.

She turns her head to look back over her shoulder. Meredith still holds the Nokia to the side of her face, but she’s wincing like she’s at a heavy metal concert.

And then Lydia does hear something. She hears a clear bell, like glass ringing. Her phone notifying her of a text message.

**Stiles Stilinski: Everything cool? You guys hear anything scary?**

There’s just the sound of Meredith humming, something low and sweet and subtle.


End file.
